Most systems for processing the sale of products are seller-driven, whereby the seller prices, packages, configures and offers the product for sale, and the buyer decides whether or not to accept the seller's offer. In a buyer-driven commerce system, on the other hand, the buyer dictates the terms of the offer and one or more sellers decide whether or not to accept. A “help wanted” advertisement, for example, is a buyer-driven inquiry since an employer is looking to locate and buy the services of a qualified employee. The inquiry is advertised to a large number of potential employees, who may respond by submitting their resumes to the prospective employer.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,207 entitled “Method And Apparatus For A Cryptographically Assisted Commercial Network System Designed To Facilitate Buyer-Driven Conditional Purchase Offers” which is assigned to the assignee of the present invention and incorporated herein by reference, discloses a buyer-driven Conditional Purchase Offer (CPO) Management System that processes binding purchase offers received from individual consumers. The purchase offers contain one or more buyer-defined conditions for the purchase of goods or services, at a buyer-defined price. The purchase offers are typically guaranteed by a general-purpose financial account, such as a debit or credit account, and thereby provide sellers with a mechanism for enforcing any agreement that may be reached with the consumer. The purchase offers are provided by the CPO Management System to sellers, for individual sellers to either accept or reject. If a seller accepts a purchase offer, the CPO Management System binds the buyer on behalf of the accepting seller, typically by charging the general-purpose financial account designated by the buyer or providing the account information to the accepting seller for processing, to form a legally binding contract. Thus, the CPO Management System empowers individual consumers to obtain goods and services, such as travel or insurance services, at prices which are set by the consumers. The CPO Management System provides numerous commercial advantages to sellers as well For example, the CPO Management System permits individual sellers to effectively sell excess capacity when actual demand fails to meet forecasted demand. In particular, the CPO Management System provides an effective mechanism for sellers to be confident that if they accept a consumer's offer, the consumer will purchase the requested goods or services at the agreed-upon price. Yet, the consumer remains unable to use the information to ascertain the seller's underlying level of price flexibility, which, if known to a seller's competitors or customers, could dramatically impact the seller's overall revenue structure.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,085,169 entitled “Conditional Purchase Offer Management System,” which issued to the assignee of the present application and is incorporated by reference in its entirety herein, discloses a conditional purchase offer (CPO) management system that permits sellers to provide proprietary rules for the acceptance of CPOs. Each of these rules establishes one or more restrictions which the seller is willing to accept for a predefined minimum price. The rules are utilized by the CPO management system to determine whether to accept, reject or counter a CPO on behalf of a particular seller. In this manner, the CPO Management System can respond to submitted CPOs in real-time on behalf of sellers, with a minimal amount of expensive, time consuming and error-prone human intervention.
For many transactions, the embodiments of the CPO Management Systems discussed above, will effectively complete transactions between buyers and sellers, with minimal intervention by the parties once the CPO has been submitted. The performance of the CPO Management System depends, at least in part, upon its utilization by a large number of both buyers and sellers. Specifically, buyers are more likely to submit purchase offers if they know the purchase offers will be reviewed by a sufficiently large number of sellers. Likewise, sellers are more likely to review offers if a sufficiently large number of offers are submitted. In addition to being a lost business opportunity, purchase offers which are not accepted represent a waste of time and effort by both buyers and sellers. Thus, buyers and sellers alike will be frustrated and discouraged from utilizing the CPO Management System if the acceptance rate for submitted purchase offers does not meet acceptable levels.
Invariably, some buyers will submit purchase offers that are not initially accepted by any seller, typically because the price offered by the buyer is too low In addition, some sellers may set their acceptance parameters too high to attract sufficient demand to fulfill all available bookings. Also, a system operator of the CPO management system may set operating parameters, such as a minimum required margin on a sale, which are incompatible with adjustments in purchaser demand. These factors, alone or in combination, may then result in an inordinate amount of purchase offers being rejected as originally posted. Thus, buyers, sellers and system operators of a buyer-driven commerce system, alike, would benefit if a system for analyzing demand data is provided to determine optimum parameters to increase acceptance of purchase offers. Such a system, in turn, would provide the means to increase revenue for the system operator and for sellers who participate in the buyer-driven commerce system.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for optimizing revenue and/or bookings from collected demand data in a buyer-driven commerce system which addresses certain shortcomings of existing technologies.